The art of sprinkling water on lawns to insure their verdent growth goes back many years and has provided numerous opportunities for creative minds to invent and improve a wide variety of water sprinkling methods.
Many of these approaches have provided for the effective delivery of water in a uniform fashion to a variety of configurations of lawn areas.
It is not uncommon for the users of such advanced sprinkling systems to find the sprinklers toppling over because of twists in the hoses leading to the sprinkler coupled with reaction forces generated in the sprinkler's sprinkling mechanism. When the sprinkler topples over, the user must turn the water off and make adjustments to hose and sprinkler.
This sprinkler toppling problem is exacerbated in situations where the lawn to be sprinkled is on a slope.
In addition to the advances in water sprinkling technology, there has been as of late a renewed interest in providing nutrients in the form of fertilizer to lawns during the water sprinkling process. Typical of such an effort is that which is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,333,493 to Beiswenger et al titled "Cartridge Feeder for Soluble Fertilizer." Beiswenger et al provides a fertilizer cartridge in series with a sprinkler and intermediary a hose connected to a source of water under pressure. Beiswenger et al make no provision for a unitary sprinkler and fertilizer dispenser that prevents sprinkler toppling as will be seen as being present in the invention to be described more fully hereinafter.
A popular approach today employed to fertilize and water a lawn at the same time will be found in a variety of hand-held fertilizer dispensing bottles that have integrally formed in the caps of these containers nozzles that allow the water under pressure to draw fertilizer from the bottle and combine the same with the water which the nozzle delivers to sprinkle a lawn.
Those individuals that employ such hand-held apparatus soon tire from the watering and lawn feeding effort, especially when a lawn has a large area to be treated. Those who have tried to place such a hand-held apparatus on the ground are frequently tortured by the inability to stop the nozzle and bottle from thrashing around.
The invention now to be described completely overcomes the deficiencies noted above and does so in a manner that is simple and inexpensive.